Please make sure you're sitting down. You are? Okay, well, Tony Abbott's former chief of staff Peta Credlin has let slip that one of the most damaging political campaigns in recent Australian political history was based on bullshit.

Credlin, who became a Sky News commentator after leaving politics, made her comments during the final minutes of Sky's Sunday Agenda.

If you missed it, this is what she said:

Along comes a carbon tax. It wasn’t a carbon tax, as you know. It was many other things in nomenclature terms but we made it a carbon tax. We made it a fight about the hip pocket and not about the environment. That was brutal retail politics and it took Abbott about six months to cut through and when he cut through, Gillard was gone.

"It wasn't a carbon tax, as you know."

Okay, okay, okay. Let's just provide some context. Australia has a complicated history in trying to do what many countries have already done – put a price on carbon emissions.

The scare resonates today, with opponents of emissions trading schemes and other market-based mechanisms still playing the "carbon tax" card.

Credlin also suggested it was time for prime minister Malcolm Turnbull to apply what Abbott did on the "carbon tax" to renewables.

That is, make the current argy bargy around renewables a "consumer" issue rather than an "environmental" one.

Is Malcolm going to be able to take something as complex as the RET (Renewable Energy Target) and break it down and argue it and hit the hustings and smash through all of that detail to have people come with him? That will be the political test.

Oh well. So that's that. Even though the government has been told by its own people it should consider some sort of carbon pricing scheme, it'll never, ever consider it because the Australian people are prone to scare campaigns about carbon taxes that aren't really carbon taxes.